By Bola Opaleke

You will find out too lateThat words come before language.You will fear the red sea evenBefore knowing what the blue seaCan do to your body.

They say: close your thighsAnd open your heart.I ask if the hand of oneIs not the leg of the other?You will look at me spitefully,

Ask yourselfIf the devil has not his own virtues?You will strangle deathAnd become his heir on the other side

Of vanity. I would askAgain what earth is poundedWith your name? You will hideYour tears and replies: one that claimsAllegiance to fire. I would remind you how

Water was the first belief your ancestors embraced,Then braid your hair in that darkness; tells youTo not talk to me about your dreams of this island,Because your mouth, it seems, would be

Too small to tell all of the nightmares I have had.

A Call To War

Is it a borrowed beautywhen the body is itself unhoused?Is it a boring homewhen the house is an island of ghosts?

As a boy lost in the unconsciousnessof his manhood, I watched my body unpeelsitself under someone else’s command.

I whispered quietly to my loneliness:can I grow my body into a cactusno one dare touches? Can Ioil all the parts not lubricated with brown lies?

A girl, walking up to mein the middle of my he-menses,asks: if I have ever tried sniffing blood

without first feeling a spider crawl up my spine?She said, at thirteen,leaving the door of her body opento menstruation, the glory of which

makes her a glow-worm in a magician's night gown — she said she lives between that wonder and shame.But as I compare her curves to mine,

proud or jealous, I could not thinkof what moon to say I was – in her night gown. She walked away before any myth on my tongue could touch her skin.

See, how beauty is the country that takesyour brains? See, how home is the fiery gravethat wants not your dead body? But,

isn't it amazing how bacon is fathered by pork?Isn't it amazing how good children of bad people think I'm a cat? Because, Jason — the boy next door — the onewho never lives on my island — he would not stop to call me a pussy.

Bola Opaleke is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. His poems have appeared — or are forthcoming — in, among others, Frontier Poetry, Rising Phoenix Review, Writers Resist, Rattle, Cleaver, One, The Nottingham Review, The Puritan, The Literary Review of Canada, Sierra Nevada Review, Dissident Voice, Poetry Quarterly, The Indianapolis Review, Canadian Literature, Empty Mirror, Poetry Pacific, Drunk Monkeys, Temz Review, St. Peters College Anthology (University of Saskatchewan), Pastiche Magazine, and others. He holds a degree in City Planning and lives in Winnipeg MB. Further information about his life and work can be found here.